Burdens
by sells sea shells
Summary: Somewhere in the New World, Chopper faces the reasons why their musician still frightens him. A little angst, a little friendship, a little doctor-y Dr. Chopper, and a little bit of reindeer potty mouth. Sorta-sequel to A Small and Simple Thing.


A/N: Another one for op_fanforall, written just last month. It's really only a kinda-sequel to **A Small and Simple Thing**; rather than a story that specifically takes place after another story, I wanted to take some of the things that made ASaT fun for me to write and set them much later in the timeline instead. A story about friends and family, rather than near-strangers. I guess you can take it as a literal sequel if you want, but it might be redundant in places since I didn't sit down with that in mind.

I swear I'll pick up a less angsty prompt next time.

**Burdens**

The Grand Line held its share of challenges for any doctor, even the future Pirate King's doctor, the doctor that had to be the best to keep up with a sea that pushed them hard and a captain that pushed himself even harder. Chopper's shelves were lined with medical texts--both the most up-to-date and the most outdated, because diseases that had vanished were not necessarily gone forever. He ordered important medicines he might never need, and he tried not to cower too badly when explaining to Nami why it had to be done. He dutifully wrote up the occasional rare curse or condition they stumbled across in their adventures, and shipped off his notes now and then to forewarn doctors everywhere. He studied and he experimented and he dried his herbs and mixed his medicines and triple-checked the labels on every little bottle. He went through the hassle of regular physicals for a crew mostly made up of maniacs. He managed regular physicals for _Zoro,_ who was the worst of all of them.

He didn't know the first thing about machines, so he made Franky sit down and explain his cyborg systems forward and back until, between the two of them, Usopp and Chopper could at least repair him enough to let him repair himself. You never knew what might happen.

You never knew, and that was why Brook frightened him. He had stopped being afraid _of_ their musician a very long time ago, of course, but as time had passed and Chopper had had opportunity to treat his wounds and figure out how to be his doctor too, a newer and colder fear had taken its place. You couldn't look at the guy and not face a stark reminder of what the Grand Line could do to a pirate crew, not feel a tremor in your soul knowing that the power of friendship was not really enough. No matter how hard you studied to keep your loved ones alive, sometimes it--

Somewhere across the decades, Chopper always felt a pang of sympathy for another doctor he would never meet, not unless you counted the day he had helped bury his remains.

But it was more than just his own youthful, overactive imagination and its worries. There was a very real reason why Brook frightened him: there were no medical charts on the biological quirks of keeping a living corpse in good health. There were no comforting books that smelled like paper and fingerprints to tell Chopper about the obscure health problems only an animated skeleton could suffer, or how the symptoms of more common concerns might become warped and confused in manifesting themselves in a body that mostly wasn't there. There was nothing to warn him that Brook _could_ be hurt or get sick in a way one wouldn't expect, or list creative alternative treatments that would work if he did.

Brook could eat and drink, could feel pain when he didn't do either--could feel pain at all, which was a whole other issue--he could get _tired,_ for heaven's sake, which required muscles and blood and energy being stored somewhere that Chopper couldn't find. The simple truth was that he still didn't fully understand how his friend functioned at all and that was the thing that frightened him, made him feel fearful and helpless and inexperienced in a sea that forgave none of those things.

It frightened him now, crouched in his Heavy Point form on the floor of the infirmary listening to Brook violently emptying his nonexistent stomach for the third time that hour. The sound was horrible. The smell was horrible. The feel of the strangely frail spine, covered only by a thin shirt, that spasmed against his broad palm with every retch was the most horrible of all.

There had been a nasty case of grotto flux going around the ship for the last week and a half, after some unknown person or persons had disobeyed doctor's orders to not drink from that suspiciously fungal underground lake while exploring; grotto flux being a fairly uncommon but mundane affliction whose only redeeming quality was that it wasn't _bloody_ flux (that is, dysentery), where the worst of everything came out of the _other_ end. The illness generally wasn't fatal if the patient was treated for dehydration and given regular injections of...

Injections. Chopper could have punched himself for not seeing this problem coming long before it arrived.

Next to him, the skeleton's latest fit died down into a few rough-sounding coughs, which then faded into ragged breathing that didn't sound much better. He didn't try to get up, and Chopper didn't try to make him. By now they both knew better than to assume too quickly that it was over with.

Brook had spent a lot of time around the sick. In fact it had seemed as though each new crewmate that took ill had made him just that bit more manic than usual, that much more driven to comfort the miserable. This was a musician's job, close kin to Chopper's own, and so for days he'd been everywhere that Chopper wasn't, playing for the women or telling awful jokes for the younger boys. The older men pretended they didn't need to be fussed over, but Brook had been there for them too. He'd been there for Chopper, who hadn't gotten sick at all (grotto flux was a primate disease) but nonetheless had needed it.

Everyone else had improved and now Chopper couldn't do a damn thing for the last to catch it, aside from crouch next to him and curse the accident of fate that had made the old man a medical mystery. He couldn't even busy himself with the minorly helpful task of taking out the bucket Brook was kneeling next to to be emptied over the side of the ship again, because by now there was hardly anything left to be emptied. Brook had finally given up on eating as causing more discomfort than _not_ eating, and as he'd gone without for years at a time before there didn't seem to be any good reason to force the issue. Chopper had made him drink, though, even if it might not have made a difference: water, juice, tea, anything to get some vitamins and medication down. But it wasn't entirely clear whether he even _had_ an immune system to boost, and the pills were an older treatment for grotto flux that wasn't as fast-acting or effective as the injections that couldn't be given.

He couldn't even be sure if Brook could actually die from this, and this realization more than any other drove home just how terrible a job he was doing.

Under his hand and the thin shirt a complex tangle of human bones shifted, trembled with exhaustion and pain. Scapula, ribs. Thoracic vertebrae. Chopper could have named them all from memory for all the good it would do. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, that he was sorry, but Brook--who was facing away from him and so surely didn't know--picked that precise moment to say something first, in that quiet solemn voice he didn't often use and which still sounded pleasant even half hoarse as it was.

It was the absolute last thing Chopper had expected to hear.

It was "Thank you."

It was--"What the hell _for?_" said Chopper bitterly, for his mouth had already been open and so the words had dashed right out before he could think about them.

"Why doctor," came the reply, suddenly hoarse and _perky_ and Chopper should have expected what came next: "If not..._huff_...for you, I'm sure I would have coughed up a lung!"

Brook started laughing then, or tried. The laugh was high-pitched and loud before it broke off into coughing again; it always seemed that the worse things were the more hysterical his laughter became. He'd gone strange inside his mind, that was just something you had to accept like you accepted that skeletons weren't actually that scary after all. Chopper knew and understood this and still wanted to hit Brook very hard right then. It didn't seem right that the only one angry at or disappointed in Chopper was Chopper.

"Shut up, this isn't funny!"

That didn't get him the reaction he was looking for either, because when the coughing stopped Brook chuckled quietly for a moment and then for the next moment didn't say anything. Then he did. "Thank you, though."

If Chopper had his expressive reindeer ears in Heavy form they would have wilted. "I don't even know what I'm doing."

He thought that maybe he'd finally made Brook understand, because for almost a minute after that he was silent save for hoarse breathing and the occasional almost-heave. But then the skeleton stirred weakly against the weight of Chopper's hand on his back and began to speak, and when he spoke this way you could not forget that he was very old, or that he had (difficult as it sometimes was to believe) once been a captain. When he spoke this way, there was not one thing weak about him.

"I was ill a few times over the years, you know."

Chopper was suddenly cold under all his fur.

"Suppose it was bound to...to happen. Let enough time pass and you'll eat anything. Some of the salted food lasted a while, and the pickled stuff. The rest was...well, you'll find you can stomach anything, eventually. Without a stomach and all--" He coughed, and didn't laugh.

"Did a bit of fishing now and again, caught a few things I didn't recognize and ate them raw. When I was in my sixties somewhere it didn't rain for the longest time, until I tried drinking seawater like a foolish novice on his first voyage, just to..._kaff_...to take the edge off, you know, it...Right stupid thing to do, only I'm not entirely certain I cared very much by then."

It was surreal how swiftly Brook could silence a room, considering what he was like the rest of the time. Chopper wanted to interrupt, but as large as he was right then he felt young and small inside and the words didn't come.

"Sometimes a man gets sick just because, doesn't he? There was that. When I landed on that island I lost an awful swordfight...made it back to my ship after and did what I'd always done, all those times, you see."

He said what he said next without faltering or growing forceful, as if he would not have batted an eye if he'd had them: "I found a corner to sleep in in the dark and I waited it out."

The surge of strength began to fade, and the commanding presence with it. Chopper thought for a moment that Brook's arms weren't going to hold him up anymore, but they did, and though he felt the tangle of bones sag tiredly through thin cloth the skeleton managed to finish.

"So you see, you've...done an awful lot. And I do believe it's working."

Neither of them said anything for a long while after that. Brook said nothing because he had already said everything, and Chopper? Chopper said nothing because he was busy thinking about a doctor's duty, and a musician's duty; he was thinking about the easing of burdens, and about how he was no longer afraid for his friend.


End file.
